Send a text that says “fine” and the person on the other end will read anger. Send “fine 🙂” and they will read something closer to what was meant, though nothing about the word has changed. The little yellow face has done more grammatical work in one glyph than an adverb could manage in a sentence, which is a strange thing for a species that spent roughly five thousand years engineering its way out of pictures. …
I still type it as “reader digest,” lowercase, the apostrophe and the capital letters missing. My fingers reveal what my memory conceals: I never studied this publication, I absorbed it. It arrived in Spanish, as Selecciones, and it sat on the tables of my childhood the way furniture does — unremarkable, permanent, load-bearing. Decades later I live in the country those pages described. I did not plan this in any way I could document. And yet I have come to believe the magazine was drawing a map the whole time, and that my body, eventually, walked to the place my mind had already been living. …